Fast Clock Secondary Display

MRB-FCS

The Fast Clock Secondary Display is a complementary product to the Fast Clock Master, allowing the current fast or real time to be displayed in multiple locations around the layout, all automatically synchronized to the master clock. All your operators can easily keep an eye on the scale time with secondary displays strategically placed in the layout room, rather than having to constantly check in with dispatch or crane their necks around corners just to see the clock. The secondary displays are connected to the fast clock master using standard Cat-5 cable and you can connect as many as needed.

Specifications

The Fast Clock Secondary Display requires an 8-18V DC power supply. This can be provided over the Cat-5 cable used for connecting the secondary display to the master or from an AC power adapter local to the secondary display.

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For those seeking more realistic model railroad operations, a fast clock - a clock that runs at some..

$100.00

News & Application Notes

Interfacing With ISE’s Fast Clocks

The idea of a clock that runs faster than real time to compensate for the compression in our model world is nothing new. The idea has been with us since at least the 1960s. It provides a way to schedule our operating sessions, providing a sense of real time passage and urgency without needing literally thousands of feet of track to represent the vast distances covered by our prototype railroads. Aside from being a display on the wall, guiding operators’ train movements, fast clocks have remained an isolated system, our model world unaffected by the passage of scale time. Think about all the things in our daily lives that are linked to the time of day and you’ll quickly realize how odd that is given all our other technological advancements, and how much potential is in that idea. I believe fast clock integration is one of the huge, unexplored areas left in the hobby today for added realism.

In this article, we’ll show you how to build an inexpensive device that allows you to synchronize items on your layout to fast clocks by using MRBus, the networking protocol that connects the Iowa Scaled Engineering Networked Fast Clocks, in conjunction with the popular Arduino prototyping environment.

Auxiliary Power from a DCC Bus

While DCC is primarily meant to power and communicate with the trains on the tracks, there are circumstances where having some auxiliary power available would be nice without having to run an extra set of wires. Maybe powering a remote turnout, an IR sensor, some animation or building lighting, or a fast clock secondary display?

Pausing Time: Using Fast Clock Hold Mode

Have you ever been in the middle of an operating session and disaster strikes? A train derails, shorting out the DCC system, taking with it a power district, or even the entire layout. The problem is eventually fixed, but in the 5 minutes it took to restore things to the way they were, your fast clock kept ticking away. With a 3:1 ratio, all trains are now suddenly 15 minutes late.

Wouldn’t it be nice to simply press a button on the fast clock to pause time, then with a single press, restart the time right where it left off?

Iowa Scaled Engineering Fast Clocks

Looking to enhance your operations with a fast clock system? Do you need multiple displays around the layout? Do you want a configurable, yet easy to use system for your operators? The Iowa Scaled Engineering Fast Clock system may be exactly what you need.